Nov. 1 (Bloomberg) -- Superhero rabbits were among the
first characters created by novelist Margaret Atwood when she
was maybe all of six. They flew around eating ice-cream cones,
shooting off an occasional bullet, but for the most part fooling
people and having fun.

In later speculative works, such as “The Handmaid’s
Tale,” “Oryx and Crake,” and “The Year of the Flood,” her
vision darkened.

“In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination,” the
prolific Canadian author considers the weird characters with
their nifty powers who populate the utopian and dystopian worlds
of science fiction.

We spoke in the Cornell Club bar in New York.

Lundborg: Is “A Handmaid’s Tale” really science fiction?

Atwood: I’d call it speculative fiction -- it considers
what it might be like if the U.S. entered a period of social
unrest, which resulted in people wanting more security in
exchange for personal freedom, and what if the form it took were
a theocracy.

Lundborg: For candidates, there already seems to be a God
test.

Atwood: A real theocracy would have a more narrow focus,
and take the position that its view of divine affairs is the
only correct one. It would eliminate heretics and that would
include everybody else.

Lundborg: Are we closer now to a theocracy than we were
when you wrote “Handmaid’s Tale” in 1985?

Atwood: There’s no question of that.

Lundborg: So, what’s causing it?

Help Us!

Atwood: You can almost draw it on a graph, the cyclical
patterns the United States goes through. Hard times bring an
upsurge of religious feeling, “Help us out, please, God, we’re
having trouble here.”

But it also brings the “We’ve got to organize and overthrow
something or other” feeling. That would be the French
Revolution, where too much power and money were concentrated at
the top, and they got in trouble through an expensive foreign
war.

Where to raise money? Must tax the already quite thoroughly
taxed people, and then the price of bread goes up. That’s the
combination for a big explosion.

Means of Reproduction

Lundborg: Why do men always feel they want to control the
means of reproduction?

Atwood: Boy, is that an old motif! You can’t have people
just marrying anybody. Really early on, it was probably a way of
preventing inbreeding. It works better to mix things up.

There have been many laws and rules about it, though the
rules themselves may be very different.

Lundborg: So you can’t write sci fi without accounting for
sex?

Atwood: You can’t. You have to account for it some way,
even if you create a planet in which people have 50 different
genders. If they don’t have sex, then to reproduce they’ll have
to send out spores or rootlets. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any
of them -- unless they’re immortal.

Lundborg: Tell me about the pointy metallic bra.

Pointy Metal Bra

Atwood: Whenever you see a clothing item that’s repeated
quite a lot, or a costume trope, you wonder where it comes from,
why it becomes obligatory, and why Bugs Bunny turns up wearing
it in “What’s Opera, Doc?”

Lundborg: And Madonna!

Atwood: She took the Peter Pan bra with circular stitching
and wore it on the outside of her clothing, but it does refer
back to the Wagnerian Walkure outfits of the 19th century.

You put the metal bra on a woman, and make her a virgin.
Plus they’ll never sag or droop.